ata 66 and blue and white g3

[james rooker]

Mike and any others interested in what works with this
problem--

Here is what I did that worked:

Remember I have a smaller drive that had MacOSX
installed on it with a
HighATA patch that enabled MacOS 10.4 to read larger
drives past the 137gb barrier -- it worked fine with
only MacOSX but played hell with Linux installers.

small drive: 20gb
large drive: 300gb

Using the MacOS 10.4 disk utilities from the smaller
drive I was able to
make a partition on the large drive that was the same
size as the small drive boot partition -- and then use
Apple Disk Utility to do a backup and restore of the
small drive to that partition on the large drive that
was still bootable in the end and still had the
HighATA patch...

Once I verified that MacOS would boot from the
restored image on the large drive -- then and only
then I could have other larger data partitions on the
large drive and I could format the smaller drive for
linux and the linux install actually worked to the
smaller drive.

So now I have the small 20gb WD drive booting linux
with yaboot
and the large drive boots MacOSX Tiger. Had tried this
once before without luck but 10.4.8 upgrade in MacOSX
did something to Disk Utilities and it worked. When I
first asked the question I had been trying to use the
large drive for linux and keep the smaller drive as
MacOSX -- that did not and does not work.

The Problem with my approach is I have to keep an
8.5gb first MacOSX
partition on the large drive to boot from or reinstall
MacOSX to...and patch that with the HighATA software
patch so that it will read the other larger partitions
on that drive properly...Otherwise it reads a 300gb
drive as if it were just a 137gb drive.

If I ran the entire G3 as just a linux box then as of
FC5 there are openfirmware patches in the kernel that
will handle large drives properly.

Anyway sorry for the long reply but figured the list
might need this info for someone else later
on...Thanks Mike for your interest and reply I
appreciate that you responded even so long after I
made the initial plea for help.

James Rooker
--- Mike Hammill <mike at kth.se> wrote:

> Dear James,
> 
> I have four B&W G3 running, two on Gentoo, one on
> FC6, and one on
> Ubuntu.  I took a quick check around and see that
> they are all running
> with small (< 80 GB) disks.  Some B&W Macs had bad
> IDE controllers:
> 
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_white_Power_Macintosh_G3
> 
> and there are some sites out there that help you
> tell if your machine
> falls into this category:
> 
> http://lowendmac.com/ppc/g3c.shtml
> 
> (look for "402" on the controller).  I remember
> trying to install SuSE
> on a B&W with a large new hard drive and it just
> about drove me insane.
> Everything _seemed_ to be going fine, then suddenly
> just hung up (and
> various, unpredictable places).  I think I always
> got "time out" errors
> though.
> 
> My suggestion would be to get the ATA controller
> your leaning toward,
> but without funds it might be tempting to seek out
> some old, smaller
> hard drive for a Linux/Mac boot and use an external
> Firewire drive for
> storing larger files/apps.
> 
> Just my 2 cents.
> /Mike
> 
> 
> 
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